Wino & Conny Ochs – Heavy Kingdom (Exile On Mainstream Records)
While aesthetic evolution can prove a difficult propsition for a great majority of established artists – often seeming as if they're damned if they stay the same and doubly damned if they shift at all – Scott “Wino” Weinrich has spent three decades defying expectations and trends, and in the process has created some of the most bracing work to have emerged from heavy music. From the sinister doom metal of Saint Vitus and the blustery stoner rock of the Obsessed to his more recent work with Shrinebuilder and Premonition 13, Weinrich has constantly defined and revised the parameters of his particular branch of the heavy metal tree, influencing pretty much every band that has attempted the style in recent years.
When most veteran artists, especially those coming from a background of louder music, announce an acoustic album, it's not unwarranted to view the endeavor with some suspicion. While there have certainly been some excellent entries into this particular field - both guitarists from Neurosis have some excellent solo releases, for instance – the idea quickly calls to mind the worst entries in MTV's “Unplugged” series. These were the sorts of performances where the musicians really didn't understand how to translate heaviness into a quieter setting – that the attaininment of listenable results relies less on how hard a guitar is strummed and more on a re-imagining of what constitutes “heavy” in the first place, that the idea can refer to mood and timbre as much as it does volume and aggression. Scott Weinrich's 2010 album Adrift may have surprised fans then, not just because it consisted solely of acoustic performances, but because of how well he pulled them off. On his most recent release, a collaboration with German singer-songwriter Conny Ochs, the rough-hewn starkness of his first solo album is augmented by Ochs' contributions, a meeting of the minds that further underscores Weinrich's refusal to be trapped in narrow genre confines.
It's tempting to say that the songs fall into one of two molds, since Ochs and Weinrich tend to trade off vocal duties, providing each other backups when they aren't taking the lead – but that fails to really convey the way that this alternating helps prevent the songs from treading too close to each other's sonic territory. This isn't to say that the backing music diverges widely from one song to the next, but the two vocalists' styles are as distinct and as interdependent as night and day, with Weinrich's raspy, weathered voice adding gravelly counterbalance to Ochs' clearer, more measured approach. Supporting this interplay, the songs amble, seeming unforced and loose without losing coherence. That four of the songs were written in one day is not at all surprising; that I can't tell for the life of me which songs those happen to be speaks to the consistency of the album's content.
One of Weinrich's strengths as a songwriter, something that's not always readily apparent but even at his most abstruse or strident still simmers beneath his work's surface, is a strong degree of directness and openness not commonly associated with metal. There are exceptions to this (the man did write “Dragon Time,” after all), but he's often been more willing to lay things on the line that others might not. Ochs' work functions much the same way – his last album wasn't called Raw Love Songs for nothing. And Heavy Kingdom is no exception to either artist's modus operandi – there are recurring themes of restlessness and the inability to resist the open road's pull, of the fractures and fissures that can show up in our dealings with others, and of the pitfalls encountered on the tortuous paths that lead to a life lived meaningfully. But there's a defiant sense of hope at the core of the songs. For all of life's dour circumstances, the singers lean firmly on a sense of non-conformity and self-reliance, and the album as a whole stands as a reminder as much of the strength to be gleaned from difficulty as it does of the troubles themselves.
One of the best songs in Weinrich's back catalog, Saint Vitus' “Born Too Late,” is essentially a lament that he wasn't born early enough to be a creative contemporary to the likes of Black Sabath and Blue Cheer, and this sort of man-out-of-place attitude is called to mind by Heavy Kingdomas well – except that here, his seemingly anachronistic nature takes less of a period-specific turn. The music he makes with Ochs suggests two convergent creative forces out of step with the artifice present in so much current music (including much of the work they happened to have inspired), individuals possessing an understanding of the sort of sacrifice and devotion requiste to a fully creative life, and all the tragedies concomitant to its triumphs. Theirs is an intuitive, natural approach, one that yields work that fits within a long tradition of artists whose work could be described as honest, without it seeming like the term was being invoked in the unconvincing, P.R.-blurb manner that it's been reduced to by the legions of musicians who would write a song like “Labour Of Love” without the ragged determination (or, quite frankly, the pedigree) necessary to make it convincing.
Ultimately, a knowledge of Ochs and Weinrich's backgrounds has little to do with an understanding of this album's content. While it certainly fits into both artists' larger body of work (as a bit more of an aesthetic outlier for the latter of the two than for the former), it's a testament to the simple, yet compelling power of two people sitting together in a room and letting the creative spirit take hold.